had survived by going into hiding or fighting with the Yugoslav, Jewish partisans. Of those transported to the death camps, nobody survived. Most survivors chose to immigrate to Israel, with some returning to North Macedonia, and others remaining in Serbia. As a result of this the number of Jews living in North Macedonia dropped to 81 in 1952. Research and awareness of the Holocaust A combination of circumstances determined little awareness in the decades after the war about the fate of the Macedonian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Its impact almost annihilated the Macedonian Jews communities and only twelve of those sent to Treblinka are known to have survived to tell the story. After the defeat of the Axis, Vardar Macedonia became again part of Yugoslavia, in its new iteration as the Communist Yugoslavia. The official line was of avoiding delving into the crimes of World War II, as they were considered to be capable of potentially destabilizing the internal inter-ethnic Yugoslav relations. This was to some extent relaxed in the Macedonian case, as the perpetrators were German and Bulgarian occupiers. Nevertheless, the mentioning of the fate of the Macedonian Jews was minimal. Only in 1958, the historian Aleksandar Matkovski published The Tragedy of the Jews from Macedonia, in 1959 translated in English under the title The Destruction of Macedonian Jewry in 1943 in the yearbook of Yad Vashem, and enlarged in a brochure in 1962. In 1967, Yugoslavia cut diplomatic ties with Israel, as it sided with the Arabs in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. This appears to have added another layer to the avoidance of researching the Holocaust. In the 1970s, the Yugoslavian authorities ordered the Macedonian historians to counter the increasing Bulgarian claims about the nonexistence of the Macedonian identity. The Institute of National History published several detailed studies on various aspects of the Bulgarian occupation of Vardar Macedonia in World War II, but the Holocaust and Bulgarian anti-Jewish measures were generally not covered. In Bulgaria the post-war communist government increasingly focused the narrative on the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews, maintaining silence around the deportation and subsequent extermination of Jews in Vardar Macedonia, Western Thrace and the Pirot region in Serbia. In 1983, Matkovski broke the silence by publishing the first Macedonian language A History of the Jews in Macedonia. The chapter "The Deportation and Liquidation of the Jews of Macedonia" updates his previous 1962